Friday, March 2, 2012

Blunt Bill Fails: Taco Bell "Conscience Exemptions" and the Common Good



As readers will know, the Blunt bill, which  demanded "conscience exemptions" on grounds of religious liberty for every Taco Bell that has religious qualms about providing this or that service to the public, went up in flames yesterday.  In National Catholic Reporter's summary of the story, I'm particularly struck by the sanity of Cornell law professor Robert Hockett's analysis of the Taco Bell (or is the phrase "ham sandwich"? so many food metaphors, so little time!) "conscience exemption" argument the U.S. Catholic bishops and their allies have been pushing in recent weeks: 


Robert Hockett of Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, N.Y., said that bill’s “moral conviction” exemption was so broadly worded as to potentially allow “all sorts of nonsense,” an issue that had been specifically addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1990.   
Citing the court’s decision that year in Employment Division v. Smith -- which held that although states have the power to accommodate otherwise illegal acts for religious purposes, they are not required to -- Hockett referenced Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in that case, which warned of allowing “every citizen to become a law unto himself.” 
Hockett said that if the reasoning of the House of Representatives' bill were applied to other areas of jurisprudence in which exceptions from the rule of law might be claimed in the name of the rights of “conscience,” federal laws might be forced to recognize people who form a “religion of one or two” that holds its members to be “religiously required to drive at 90 miles an hour, to rob banks, to pollute the environment, or engage in identity theft.” 
“One also wonders how the sponsors of this bill intend to reconcile it with the ‘anti-Shariah law’ bills that so many of them seem likewise to favor," Hockett said. 
“There’s no way you can have the rule of law if you give this kind of plenary exemption power to everybody who claims a right to special treatment on the basis of conscience to do whatever they want,” he said.

My religious beliefs command me to drive at 90 miles per hour in the city limits.  And so who are you with your sectarian, irreligious self to inform me that I have no right to obey the imperatives of my religion and to demand a "conscience exemption" that dispenses me from speed-limit laws binding other citizens?

As Professor Hockett rightly observes, all sorts of nonsense hovers behind the "conscience exemption" rhetoric the U.S. Catholic bishops are defending these days, and it's toxic nonsense for the body politic and common good.  And the only basis I've seen any of the Catholics defending the bishops offering for their support of the toxic nonsense is the proposal that, if Catholics do it, it's good.  Over and over again, this turns out to be the bottom line of the bishops' defenders:

We're not like those crazy sects that proclaim believers must always drive 90 miles per hour.  We're Catholics.

And our bishops are good guys.  Because they say so.  And because we say so.  We're Catholics, after all, don't you see.

Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, here's the kind of thing that would be permitted freely, no questions asked, if the bishops prevail with their toxic, common good-dissolving demand for special rights based on religious liberty: as Rob Tisani reports at Box Turtle Bulletin, Dorothy Bond, a high school principal in Haywood Co., Tennessee, has been informing gay students that they are headed to hell and are unwelcome at her school.

Ms. Bond resigned yesterday after the media and ACLU began to publicize what she has been doing in obedience to her religious beliefs and her conscience in the school she administers.  As Tisani writes, this story is a clear-cut illustration of what's at stake in the current crusade to defend "religious liberty" and grant Taco Bell (or ham-sandwich, as the case may be) "conscience exemptions": 

It’s a clear-cut religious freedom issue. A government employee can’t demand that the public adhere to her own religious practices in order to receive government services. What could be more clear? But then I think of that New York town clerk who wouldn’t issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, claiming it violated her own religious freedom. The antigays rushed to her defense. 
That’s scary. And it’s new — this notion that religious freedom means you have to pass a state employee’s personal religious test before they’ll help you. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and religious freedom is being penalized for not adhering to a government official’s religion.

I'm particularly struck by Tisani's conclusion here: those defending "religious freedom" and Taco Bell "conscience exemptions" in the American political sector right now are turning the concept of religious freedom upside down in a cynical Orwellian way.  War is peace.  Religious freedom means my freedom to deny freedom and rights to you.  Even when your own faith-based conscience moves in a direction opposite to mine (vide Tim Huelskamp).

Because I say so.  Because my faith-based group commands that I drive 90 miles per hour at all times, and how dare you deny me that right in a nation that respects religious liberty?

What the bishops and their supporters continue to demand is Orwellian in the extreme, and as Orwell's chilling works dissecting how totalitarian regimes establish themselves amply demonstrate, one of the first ways ruthless controlling minorities seek to gain a foothold in any society is to turn language on its head--and, in particular, to pervert the slogans that organize the social life of a society: Arbeit macht frei.

And in other news about the contraceptive situation and the Catholic bishops' "religious liberty" crusade, here's a shocker: a recent Kaiser Foundation poll shows that a large majority of American citizens support the judgment of the Obama administration that health care plans should cover contraceptives.  Who'd have been  able to predict this?

63% of citizens side with the Obama administration against the "religious freedom" crowd.  67% of independent women voters support the administration's stance.  60% of Catholics do so.

Who'd have thought it?  Who'd have thought that in 2012, picking a fight about birth control and health insurance coverage would turn out to be a monumentally stupid decision for the U.S. Catholic bishops and "liberal" Catholics who are hellbent on seeing the bishops regain in the public square the mojo they've thrown way hand over fist due to their handling of the clerical sexual abuse crisis?

Who could have predicted that this would be a singularly absurd fight to pick at this moment in history when contraception has long since been a dead issue for a large majority of citizens--a singularly stupid way to try to force fellow Catholics back into positions of obediential respect for the bishops who are, after all, such good guys at heart?

It's almost as if the bishops--but, even worse, their "liberal" co-belligerents who claim to speak for the rest of us in the media--are quite spectacularly out of touch.  Living in a bubble.  Deceived by the positions of power and privilege they occupy into imagining that the world as they see it is the real world.

Perhaps if they listened more widely, and, in particular, to the voices of the many, many brother and sister Catholics who find ourselves extremely alienated by the bishops and their supporters in recent months, they'd have a clearer optic on the world beyond their small, secure, elitist bubbles.

The graphic is an excerpt from a letter George Washington wrote in 1790 to the synagogue community of Newport, Rhode Island, noting that the concept of religious freedom serves the common good--protecting the religious beliefs of individuals while preventing the exercise of religion-based bigotry that attacks the common good.

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